Friday, October 17, 2014

A Job

His
life is his job. His job is taking lives. He’s good at what he does.______________________

I wasn’t always good at my job. Hell, I haven’t always done it. There
was a time — a few decades or lifetimes ago — when I didn’t even know I could
be good at it. I enlisted, like so many of my friends, because I needed to. I
would have been drafted eventually, and I wanted to do something to help. All
those people suffering needed someone to do some good. All these years later
I’m not sure it was good we did. Hell, I’m not sure what good is anymore.

It seems that every generation has a
defining moment. For my parents’ generation it was the Four-Hour War. India
struck first with a missile that hit Beijing. China struck back. India fired
again. When all the dozens of nukes were fired, the ones that hit took a
billion lives in an instant and another half billion died of radiation
poisoning. My dad still talks about where he was that day. My mom doesn’t talk
about it, not unless she’s been drinking.

I was born into a world that avoided nukes,
hated nukes, destroyed nukes at all costs. It was taught to me with my letters
and numbers in school that nukes were evil. The radiation shield Japan put up
to contain the fallout was the shining example of how evil nukes were. Around
the time I was ten the scattered, rural survivors of the Four-Hour War got
together and created a new government that rejected everything that had caused
the war to begin with. They signed a treaty, had democratic elections, and set
out to show the world how to recover from the apocalypse. I remember the naive
hope we all had.

“Sitrep”

“Sir, they found the surprise we left.”

“Casualties?”

“Unconfirmed, but it looks like a dozen
troops were hit, sir.”

“How much?”

“Sir?”

“Time. How much time did that buy us?”

“I give us an extra ten minutes to exfil,
sir.”

“Copy that.”

Then they tore it all apart. It depends on
who you ask, some say it was the African Union that struck the first blow.
Others say it was when Russia allied themselves with the Arab-Persian Empire.
Some think that the North American Alliance could have stopped it by
intervening. I don’t really give a damn. It started and then it got ugly.
Diplomacy failed. Negotiators were shot at the table. All pretty bad stuff, to
be sure, but when the Indo-Sino regime started using gene-bombs against the
Russians I had to do something. I had to enlist.

“Move, you lazy sonsabitches! We’ve got ten
minutes and two clicks to the LZ. Ain’t none of you want to stick behind and
let them figure out how your genes are put together.”